The Stedelijk Museum
The Stedelijk Museum is a modern art museum and its collection consists of more than 100 000 works of art, including works of applied art and industrial design.
For the time of its renovation, The Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam is located on the Oosterdokskade next to Central Station. In this neighbourhood where the old and new city meet, it occupies a part of the Post CS building. Stedelijk Museum CS (SMCS) offers a varied exhibition program of art, film, photography, video and design, primarily focusing on contemporary developments from after 1968.
Partly because of the climatic conditions in the building, the classic modern works from Chagall, Picasso and others will not be on display here.
The collection will be on show again in the renovated and extended Stedelijk Museum at the Museumplein, close to the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh Museum, expected to reopen August 2008.
Lectures, presentations and film screenings take place every Thursday evening on the 11th floor. From this top floor, Club 11 offers a breathtaking panorama over the heart of Amsterdam and the IJ.
The Buildings – Old and New
The Stedelijk´s main building was built in the years 1891-1895 at Paulus Potterstraat, within a short walking distance to the Rijksmuseum, to house the collection of art and antiques left to the city by Sophia Augusta Lopez Suasso de Bruyn.
The project of the old Stedelijk building was managed by A. W. Weissman, Amsterdam’s city architect at the time. It was a period when Dutch architecture was searching for its values in the historical past. The Stedelijk´s neo renaissance façade, decorated with several figurative sculptures, has been modernized and simplified during the following renovations, losing much of its rich decorum.
In 1938 the Stedelijk became the state museum of modern art. Still, people of Amsterdam like the old Weissman building, probably because of the contrast it creates with the modern collections exhibited inside.
Present renovations will double the exhibition space of the museum by adding a big and new modern building behind. It was designed by an Amsterdam firm called Benthem Crouwel Architects.
The Collection
The Stedelijk Museum has one of the richest modern art collections in the world. Along with all big names of modern painting movements as Impressionists, Fauvism, Cubism, Expressionism you can see a unique collection of 29 paintings by Casimir Malevich, an exceptional collection of De Stijl and the Cobra movement, a superb Dutch photography collection, a very good collection of design and furniture, an interesting collection of European and American trends in art since 1950 as well as works of Matisse, Picasso, Newman en Rauschenberg and Warhol, completed with Italian Arte Povera and German modern painting.
Opening hours
Open for the public daily 10 am - 6 pm.
Entrance fees € 9,00; reduced: € 4,50.
Museum's temporary location:
Stedelijk Museum CS
2nd and 3rd floor of the Post-CS Building
Oosterdokskade 5
1011 AD Amsterdam
